Leon Trotsky: The Transitional
programme

Trade Unions in the Transitional Epoch

In the struggle for partial and transitional demands, the workers now more
than ever before need mass organizations, principally trade unions. The powerful
growth of trade unionism in France and the United States is the best refutation
of the preachments of those ultra-left doctrinaires who have been teaching that
trade unions have "outlived their usefulness."

The Bolshevik-Leninist stands in the front-line trenches of all kinds of
struggles, even when they involve only the most modest material interests or
democratic rights of the working class. He takes active part in mass trade
unions for the purpose of strengthening them and raising their spirit of
militancy. He fights uncompromisingly against any attempt to subordinate the
unions to the bourgeois state and bind the proletariat to "compulsory
arbitration" and every other form of police guardianship—not only fascist
but also "democratic." Only on the basis of such work within the trade
unions is successful struggle possible against the reformists, including those
of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Sectarian attempts to build or preserve small
"revolutionary" unions, as a second edition of the party, signify in
actuality the renouncing of the struggle for leadership of the working class. It
is necessary to establish this firm rule: self-isolation of the capitulationist
variety from mass trade unions, which is tantamount to a betrayal of the
revolution, is incompatible with membership in the Fourth International.

At the same time, the Fourth International resolutely rejects and condemns
trade union fetishism, equally characteristic of trade unionists and
syndicalists.

(a) Trade unions do not offer, and in line with their task, composition. and
manner of recruiting membership, cannot offer a finished revolutionary program;
in consequence, they cannot replace the party. The building of national
revolutionary parties as sections of the Fourth International is the central
task of the transitional epoch.

(b) Trade unions, even the most powerful, embrace no more than 20 to 25
percent of the working class, and at that, predominantly the more skilled and
better paid layers. The more oppressed majority of the working class is drawn
only episodically into the struggle, during a period of exceptional upsurges in
the labor movement. During such moments it is necessary to create organizations ad
hoc, embracing the whole fighting mass: strike committees, factory
committees, and finally, soviets.

(c) As organizations expressive of the top layers of the proletariat, trade
unions, as witnessed by all past historical experience, including the fresh
experience of the anarcho-syndicalist unions in Spain, developed powerful
tendencies toward compromise with the bourgeois-democratic regime. In periods of
acute class struggle, the leading bodies of the trade unions aim to become
masters of the mass movement in order to render it harmless. This is already
occurring during the period of simple strikes, especially in the case of the
mass sit-down strikes which shake the principle of bourgeois property. In time
of war or revolution, when the bourgeoisie is plunged into exceptional
difficulties, trade union leaders usually become bourgeois ministers.

Therefore, the sections of the Fourth International should always strive not
only to renew the top leadership of the trade unions, boldly and resolutely in
critical moments advancing new militant leaders in place of routine
functionaries and careerists, but also to create in all possible instances
independent militant organizations corresponding more closely to the tasks of
mass struggle against bourgeois society; and, if necessary, not flinching even
in the face of a direct break with the conservative apparatus of the trade
unions. If it be criminal to turn one's back on mass organizations for the sake
of fostering sectarian factions, it is no less so passively to tolerate
subordination of the revolutionary mass movement to the control of openly
reactionary or disguised conservative ("progressive") bureaucratic
cliques. Trade unions are not ends in themselves; they are but means along the
road to proletarian revolution. [Back to Contents]

Factory Committees

During a transitional epoch, the workers' movement does not have a systematic
and well-balanced, but a feverish and explosive character. Slogans as well as
organizational forms should be subordinated to the indices of the movement. On
guard against routine handling of a situation as against a plague, the
leadership should respond sensitively to the initiative of the masses.

Sit-down strikes, the latest expression of this kind of initiative,
go beyond the limits of "normal" capitalist procedure. Independently
of the demands of the strikers, the temporary seizure of factories deals a blow
to the idol, capitalist property. Every sit-down strike poses in a practical
manner the question of who is boss of the factory: the capitalist or the
workers?

If the sit-down strike raises this question episodically, the factory
committee gives it organized expression. Elected by all the factory
employees, the factory committee immediately creates a counterweight to the will
of the administration.

To the reformist criticism of bosses of the so-called "economic
royalist" type like Ford in contradistinction to "good,"
"democratic" exploiters, we counterpose the slogan of factory
committees as centers of struggle against both the first and the second.

Trade union bureaucrats will, as a general rule, resist the creation of
factory committees, just as they resist every bold step along the road of
mobilizing the masses.

However, the wider the sweep of the movement, the easier will it be to break
this resistance. Where the closed shop has already been instituted in
"peaceful" times, the committee will formally coincide with the usual
organ of the trade union, but will renew its personnel and widen its functions.
The prime significance of the committee, however, lies in the fact that it
becomes the militant staff for such working class layers, as the trade union is
usually incapable of moving to action. It is precisely from these more oppressed
layers that the most self-sacrificing battalions of the revolution will come.

From the moment that the committee makes its appearance, a factual dual power
is established in the factory. By its very essence it represents the
transitional state, because it includes in itself two irreconcilable regimes:
the capitalist and the proletarian. The fundamental significance of factory
committees is precisely contained in the fact that they open the doors, if not
to a direct revolutionary, then to a pre-revolutionary period—between the
bourgeois and the proletarian regimes. That the propagation of the factory
committee idea is neither premature nor artificial is amply attested to by the
waves of sit-down strikes spreading through several countries. New waves of this
type will be inevitable in the immediate future. It is necessary to begin a
campaign in favor of factory committees in time in order not to be caught
unawares. [Back to Contents]

"Business Secrets" and Workers' Control of Industry

Liberal capitalism, based upon competition and free trade, has completely
receded into the past. its successor, monopolistic capitalism not only does not
mitigate the anarchy of the market, but on the contrary imparts to it a
particularly convulsive character. The necessity of "controlling"
economy, of placing state "guidance" over industry and of
"planning" is today recognized—at least in words—by almost all
current bourgeois and petty bourgeois tendencies, from fascist to Social
Democratic. with the fascists, it is manly a question of "planned"
plundering of the people for military purposes. The Social Democrats prepare to
drain the ocean of anarchy with spoonfuls of bureaucratic "planning."
Engineers and professors write articles about "technocracy." In their
cowardly experiments in "regulation," democratic governments run
head-on into the invincible sabotage of big capital.

The actual relationship existing between the exploiters and the democratic
"controllers" is best characterized by the fact that the gentlemen
"reformers" stop short in pious trepidation before the threshold of
the trusts and their business "secrets." Here the principle of
"non-interference" with business dominates. The accounts kept between
the individual capitalist and society remain the secret of the capitalist: they
are not the concern of society. The motivation offered for the principle of
business "secrets" is ostensibly, as in the epoch of liberal
capitalism, that of free ' competition." In reality, the trusts keep no
secrets from one another. The business secrets of the present epoch are part of
a persistent plot of monopoly capitalism against the interests of society.
Projects for limiting the autocracy of "economic royalists" will
continue to be pathetic farces as long as private owners of the social means of
production can hide from producers and consumers the machinations of
exploitation, robbery and fraud. The abolition of "business secrets"
is the first step toward actual control of industry.

Workers no less than capitalists have the right to know the
"secrets" of the factory, of the trust, of the whole branch of
industry, of the national economy as a whole. First and foremost, banks, heavy
industry and centralized transport should be placed under an observation glass.

The immediate tasks of workers' control should be to explain the debits and
credits of society, beginning with individual business undertakings; to
determine the actual share of the national income appropriated by individual
capitalists and by the exploiters as a whole; to expose the behind-the-scenes
deals and swindles of banks and trusts; finally, to reveal to all members of
society that unconscionable squandering of human labor which is the result of
capitalist anarchy and the naked pursuit of profits.

No office holder of the bourgeois state is in a position to carry out this
work, no matter with how great authority one would wish to endow him. All the
world was witness to the impotence of President Roosevelt and Premier Blum
against the plottings of the "60" or "200 Families" of their
respective nations. To break the resistance of the exploiters, the mass pressure
of the proletariat is necessary. Only factory committees can bring about real
control of production, calling in—as consultants but not as
"technocrats"—specialists sincerely devoted to the people:
accountants, statisticians, engineers, scientists, etc.

The struggle against unemployment is not to be considered without the calling
for a broad and bold organization of public works. But public works can
have a continuous and progressive significance for society, as for the
unemployed themselves, only when they are made part of a general plan worked out
to cover a considerable number of years. Within the framework of this plan, the
workers would demand resumption, as public utilities, of work in private
businesses closed as a result of the crisis. Workers' control in such case:
would be replaced by direct workers' management.

The working out of even the most elementary economic plan—from the point of
view of the exploited, not the exploiters—is impossible without workers'
control, that is, without the penetration of the workers' eye into all open and
concealed springs of capitalist economy. Committees representing individual
business enterprises should meet at conference to choose corresponding
committees of trusts, whole branches of industry, economic regions and finally,
of national industry as a whole. Thus, workers' control becomes a school for
planned economy. On the basis of the experience of control, the proletariat
will prepare itself for direct management of nationalized industry when the hour
for that eventuality strikes.

To those capitalists, mainly of the lower and middle strata, who of their own
accord sometimes offer to throw open their books to the workers — usually to
demonstrate the necessity of lowering wages—the workers answer that they are
not interested in the bookkeeping of individual bankrupts or semi-bankrupts but
in the account ledgers of all exploiters as a whole. The workers cannot and do
not wish to accommodate the level of their living conditions to the exigencies
of individual capitalists, themselves victims of their own regime. The task is
one of reorganizing the whole system of production and distribution on a more
dignified and workable basis if the abolition of business secrets be a necessary
condition to workers' control, then control is the first step along the road to
the socialist guidance of economy.